Convivial Autonomy in Platform Capitalism

The rise of digital technology and the politics of lockdown have pushed Western economies towards what Nick Srnicek calls ‘platform capitalism’. Digital companies like Uber, Deliveroo, and TaskRabbit develop apps that workers download to acquire work. These apps extract data from their workers in order to subsequently control their conduct. This chapter confronts this situation of digital governmentality with the workerist notion of autonomy to assess what autonomy can mean in the age of platform capitalism. During the 1960s and 1970s, workerists like Tronti and Negri argued that workers can spontaneously organize resistance against capital and thereby lead the way towards an autonomous future. Their findings were, however, on the basis of observations from 1960s factory struggles, not from today’s digital platform labour. Emancipatory initiatives should reinvent the concept of ‘autonomy’ to emphasize ways out of platform capitalism. This chapter interprets workerist autonomy along the lines of ‘conviviality’, as discussed by degrowth thinkers like Illich and Latouche and concludes that privately owned platforms tend to become radical monopolies, whereas cooperative digital platforms could become convivial tools for collective self-organization.